Trump haters always think they haven't been aggressive enough in taking Trump down.
Politico senior writer Ankush Khardori posted an article on Election Day headlined "Avoiding Merrick Garland’s Mistakes the Next Time Democrats Hold Power." The "mistakes" Khardori sees are that Garland did not push hard enough nor fast enough in his politically motivated lawfare against Trump, even though it resulted in two federal indictments as well as two federally influenced state indictments.
Khardori's thirst for lawfare vengeance in the next future Democrat DOJ was inspired by a newly published book. Leftist journalists scold Garland as a spineless jellyfish.
On Tuesday, the journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis published a book that lays out exactly what not to do if accountability is the goal. Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department is the most detailed account yet of the Justice Department’s disastrous effort to bring Donald Trump to trial during Joe Biden’s administration, which is likely to long rank among U.S. law enforcement’s greatest failures.
History will not judge this effort kindly, but perhaps more importantly — at this fractious and precarious moment in American politics — the book contains critical lessons for a future administration that wants to focus on serious legal accountability for powerful political figures.
It is not too soon for the thinking about this work to start, even though the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision last summer makes it much easier for Trump to avoid federal prosecution in the future. And, for all we know, Trump could issue a mass federal pardon for members of his administration when his term ends. The levers of accountability may have to come from other prosecutorial bodies or civil, rather than criminal, law.
But if Democrats are to avoid making the same mistakes all over again, Leonnig and Davis’s book offers both an engaging and enraging opportunity to learn. It’s a journalistic tour-de-force that draws on interviews with more than 250 key individuals to reveal how former Attorney General Merrick Garland and top leaders at the DOJ and the FBI, in the authors’ words, “helped pave a path for Trump’s reascendance, and his eventual unraveling of the department’s core mission.”
The lawfare under Merrick Garland's DOJ with its multiple indictments against Trump was unprecedented in American history for its utterly political motivation but Khardori is still upset with Garland for not going far enough or fast enough.
The book includes forehead-smacking details about the Biden-Garland DOJ’s bungled prosecutorial effort. Perhaps chief among them is that DOJ and FBI leaders rejected at least three different proposals by career prosecutors over the course of 2021 to expand the department’s investigation of the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol to include Trump and his advisers’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The reason? Fear that investigating Trump would seem too political and would upset Republicans.
Leonnig and Davis report that it took a year before the DOJ agreed in principle to begin an investigation that they knew might touch on Trump himself — starting with Trump’s “fake” electors scheme — but the FBI then still dragged its feet for a couple more months. It was not until April 14, 2022 — fifteen months after Jan. 6 — that Garland signed a memo approving the investigation into Trump, but even that was not the end of the delays. Things did not get underway in earnest until the Jan. 6 Committee publicly embarrassed the Justice Department in a series of hearings in summer 2022 and, really, until the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith after the 2022 midterms.
Khardori concludes with a blatant appeal for the next Democrat DOJ to go ahead and be utterly political without any pretense of fairness when pursuing Lawfare:
The DOJ’s fatally delayed and failed effort to prosecute Trump is quite possibly the strongest evidence possible that this view is simplistic at best and foolish at worst. We have a political process that shapes the law, but at the same time, our legal system has to reckon with difficult political matters and political figures, whether we like it or not.
In other words, the DOJ should have taken Trump down, and they should always put politics at the forefront in their prosecutions.
